Lead researcher Dr Antony Burnham, from The Australian National University, said: ‘The history of the Earth is like a book with its first chapter ripped out with no surviving rocks from the very early period, but we’ve used these trace elements of zircon to build a profile of the world at that time.

‘Our research indicates there were no mountains and continental collisions during Earth’s first 700 million years or more of existence – it was a much more quiet and dull place.

‘Our findings also showed that there are strong similarities with zircon from the types of rocks that predominated for the following 1.5 billion years, suggesting that it took the Earth a long time to evolve into the planet that we know today.’

Researcher Dr Antony Burnham said earth was a much more quiet and dull place for the first 700 million years (Picture: PA)

Sandstone from the Jack Hills date back to when earth was just 160,000,000 years old (Picture: PA)

The team, whose findings are reported in the journal Nature Geoscience, conducted a forensic study of the grains looking for clues to their formation.

They found that the zircon was created by melting old igneous rocks rather than sediments.